Discoverability Is Only Solved If You Can Be Discovered by Widdershins This is a follow up to my post where Widdershins talks about how they agree with certain parts of my argument, but that the discoverability piece is flawed. Read post ➡ Saw this in my RSS feed and thought it was an interesting take that's worth sharing - also Widdershins' blog is excellent. I'd recommend adding it to your feed reader. I think the argument around other people controlling the gate to discoverability i...

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this before, but there was a time in the 2000s where I used a Swedish keyboard. Apple used to offer a range of different keyboard options at checkout (at least in Singapore), and I chose Swedish. It had dedicated diacritic keys, and it was easy with the right Option key (known as Alt Graph elsewhere) to type accented letters. I thought it was awesome. Thesedays I’d sooner reach for a Japanese layout if I were to ditch ANSI, but I’m also intruded by ...

There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC. At the CGPM , they decided the last leap second we'll ever see for UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, happened back at the end of 2016 . Of course they made that decision while I was out on vacation, so I'm just getting this video up now: But what's the CGPM, why does this matter, and why am I excited about it? There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC. At the CGPM , they decided the ...

A golden glow peeked through the edges of the curtains. What colour is the sky this morning? , I wondered, knowing in the back of my mind that the colours may only be there for a few more minutes – such is the pace of the sunrise. No moment can be taken for granted. I opened the curtains and saw a salmon-esque glow in the sky: not quite pink, but not quite orange: a mix of both colours. The sun was rising in the opposite direction, at the stage where the whole landscape seems transformed by e...

Sometimes when I read a post, I get the growing feeling that I'm reading the output of an LLM. I can't necessarily define why, although there are the common tells (it's not the em-dashes, it's the load-bearing tapestries). As I do this my desire to read on atrophies, sometimes to the point of revulsion There are tools out there that claim to be able to tell the difference between LLM-written prose and the old-fashioned biological product. I'm wary of them, partly due skeptism about ...

With my kids I’m currently building a little dungeron crawler and we’re trying to learn a bit about game development along the way. However given that we live in the modern times of increasing capabilities we wanted to get a narrator and voice over. But we also wanted it to not sound like everyone’s standard AI voices so I looked into what options there are on the table. After some investigation I narrowed down to using Qwen3-TTS which uses voice embeddings for custom voices. Wi...

I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily drivers for software engineers. I think we've reached a new inflection point in October 2026, and this time it's for vibe coding computer games . Tree Appreciator Emberwick Battle Drones Pumpkin Farmer, aka Quarter Sun Cove Four times as insulting What happ...

The apartment is packed up and empty and I'm leaving New York for Durham this Saturday. Just short of my 9th full year here. People, visitors mostly I guess, seem to associate New York with skyscrapers and traffic and concrete. To me New York is the water. Looking out from Astoria Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Fort Totten Park, Orchard Beach, the parks on both sides of the Hudson, (JFK) Boulevard East, Shore Road Park, and the Belt Parkway looking out at Jamaica Bay. Looking out from the ferries...

Dividing integers is slow on our processors. A 32-bit division costs: processor latency throughput Emerald Rapids about 12 cycles one every 6 cycles Zen 4 9 to 12 cycles one every 6 cycles Zen 5 10 to 13 cycles one every 6 cycles Arrow Lake performance core 12 cycles one every 6 cycles Apple M4 performance core 7 cycles one every 2 cycles On Zen 4 and Zen 5, the latency depends on the inputs. The x86 rows are idiv ( uops...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Open Markdown files SumatraPDF can open and view Markdown documents ( .md , .markdown ), rendered as formatted text with GitHub Flavored Markdown (tables, task lists, strikethrough). The installer registers the file association. This comes with an update of the MuPDF rendering engine to 1.28. Fill in PDF forms PDF forms can be filled in directly: click checkboxes and radio buttons, type into text fields in pl...

tl;dr; GitHub’s language bar counts every byte in your repo, including generated docs and test suites. A few lines in .gitattributes tell it what to skip. For my project, that took it from “75% HTML” to roughly 62% Rust and 38% Python, which is what the project really is. You know that colorful bar on every GitHub repo’s page, the one that says what the project is written in ? I just learned you can tell it what to count. On one of my projects, it made a big difference. Why doe...

Andrew “Geeky” Hawkes knows what it takes to bring a new combat aircraft into service. As one of the first-ever Royal Air Force pilots to train and fight on the Eurofighter Typhoon, he helped introduce cutting-edge capabilities and develop tactics for the force. At Shield, he’s known to his colleagues almost exclusively as Geeky, a callsign he earned by being “massively computer literate” and quickly mastering the Typhoon’s technical details. Over time, he’s grown to embrace the ...

It is 1995. Edward Thornberg tilts back in his chair, frowning as he re-reads the letter in his hands. In his sixties, he still has a full head of hair and the trim body of a former college track star. He works in a spacious office with century-old furniture and a PC more powerful than he needs. The letter begins, “Dear President Thornberg,” but goes downhill from there. It is on university stationery, and he is sure that its author has sent copies to other members of the ad hoc committee ...

The wonderful DataPhilly meetup community asked me to come give a talk on any topic, and I talked for half an hour on embedding-based retrieval, machine learning model artifacts creation and inference, general versus smaller models, and understanding latency and ONNX conversion tradeoffs. People also had some fantastic questions around what can we embed, tradeoffs in hosting your own models versus API for inference, and whether a model’s data or achitecture is more important. It was especial...

Have you seen this ? If you haven't, you should. I think everyone needs to. Wealth inequality on a scale this extreme is almost impossible to explain. You have to experience it to understand. Go ahead. Try it out . Where is the top of this graph? Good question. Keep scrolling up. Last time I did this it took me 12 minutes and 51 seconds, but the whole time I had a way out. We get a button on the screen that lets us punch out any time we want: I quit . But do other Americans get an easy...

In this week's big news (though it's only Wednesday), OpenAI announced a proof that the exponential-time hypothesis is false , with a Lean proof . Later Anthropic released their own paper . Ryan O'Donnell  and Shiva Kintali  posted follow-up proofs, smartly focusing on simplicity rather than getting the best bounds. OpenAI will partner with three of my favorite complexity theorists, Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi and Ryan Williams to verify and study the proof. I have not verified...

The Golden Temple, Amritsar, by Edwin Lord Weeks, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at space fiber optic cable manufacturing, nuclear district heating, Spain’s high-speed rail crash, China’s spaceplane, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing An independent committee’s report on the huge Hong ...

You might imagine space to be empty. But the seeming void contains a barely perceptible fog of hydrogen and other neutral atoms. In 2020, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, having passed the orbit of Pluto, measured a proxy for the amount of hydrogen around it. In the area between stars in our galaxy — the “interstellar medium,” or ISM — New Horizons found around 130 hydrogen atoms per liter of space. Source You might imagine space to be empty. But the seeming void contains a barely pe...

I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year I’ve been disappointed by all the harness offerings. For inexplicable reasons most are built with web stacks, and consume enormous amounts of memory. At its core a coding harness is essentially...

As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter. As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter. As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter. As 2026 hurtles...

Elegance and intelligence can have a surprisingly negative correlation. Intelligent people sometimes produce inelegant solutions because they’re capable of rapidly brute-forcing problems. If I had to remember a hundred names, I would spend time coming up with clever mnemonics. John von Neumann would probably just remember them. There’s a famous von Neumann story where he was asked how far a fly must travel if it kept flying between two cyclists who were approaching each other at some fixed...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-98432 for the project Linux , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a use-after-kfree where retransmitting a crafted connection request while finishing the handshake of that same connection causes funny things to happen up to and including arbitrary code execution. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming langua...

Avoid Public Functions Calling Other Public Functions Oct 29, 2026 A small-scale rule of thumb. This article will land much better with a concrete example, but I am drawing a blank here, so you gotta just blindly trust my say so! When implementing a software module, it’s often a case that you are writing a public function foo , and at least part of what foo does is already handled by another public function bar . The DRY instinct encourages you to call bar() from within foo . ...